The role of verb repetition in cumulative structural priming in comprehension.

Abstract

Recently processed syntactic information is likely to play a fundamental role in online sentence comprehension. For example, there is now a good deal of evidence that the processing of a syntactic structure (the target) is facilitated if the same structure was processed on the immediately preceding trial (the prime), a phenomenon known as structural priming. However, compared with structural priming in production, structural priming in comprehension remains relatively understudied. We investigate an aspect of structural priming in comprehension that is comparatively well understood in production but has received little attention in comprehension: the cumulative effect of structural primes on subsequently processed sentences. We further ask whether this effect is modulated by lexical overlap between preceding primes and the target. In 3 self-paced reading experiments, we find that structural priming effects in comprehension are cumulative and of similar magnitude both with and without lexical overlap. We discuss the relevance of our results to questions about the relationship between recent experience and online language processing. (PsycINFO Database Record

Readers generalize adaptation to newly-encountered dialectal structures to other unfamiliar structures

“…We provide further evidence that Web-based, crowdsourced data collection paradigms (e.g., Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2012) can replicate patterns observed in laboratory studies of reading time, including those involving within-experiment changes in reading behavior (see also Craycraft & Jaeger, 2015; Fine & Jaeger, 2016; Fine et al, 2013). …”

“…Indeed, this incremental cumulative facilitation to novel structures closely resembles cumulative priming of known structures (Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, & Christiansen, 2011; Farmer et al, 2014; Fine et al, 2010, 2013; Fine & Jaeger, 2016). This is expected if priming—like the learning of novel structures—is a form of implicit learning about syntax (Bock & Griffin, 2000; Chang et al, 2006; Dell & Chang, 2014; Fine & Jaeger, 2013; Jaeger & Snider, 2013).…”

“…As a final predictor in this residual reading time regression, we included the log serial position of the item within the experiment (following Fine and Jaeger, 2016). Reading times have been observed to generally decrease over the course of self-paced experiments as participants become accustomed to the self-paced reading task (e.g., Fine et al, 2010, 2013); this general speed-up is separate from, and can be empirically dissociated from, adaptation to any particular syntactic structures (Fine et al, 2010).…”

“…(To facilitate comparison to prior studies and interpretation, we visualize the data with the same three bins of critical trial numbers used by Kaschak and Glenberg, 2004: critical trials 1–3, critical trials 4–7, and critical trials 8–10. However, the regression incorporated the full range of individual critical trial numbers in order to incorporate all of the information available about changes over the course of the experiment, following Fine et al, 2013; Fine & Jaeger, 2016)…”

“…Ferreira, Bock, Wilson, & Cohen, 2008; Kaschak, Kutta, & Jones, 2011; Jaeger & Snider, 2013; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Alternative accounts attribute trial-to-trial facilitation, also referred to as structural or syntactic priming , to short-term boosts in the activation of recently processed structures (Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Traxler & Tooley, 2008); in these accounts, the cumulative effects observed in recent studies require another, different explanation (for further discussion, see Fine & Jaeger, 2016). One piece of support for the implicit-learning hypothesis comes from the observation that structural priming in comprehension seems to be sensitive to how unexpected the prime was: Less expected structures show greater priming in comprehension (Arai & Mazuka, 2014; Fine & Jaeger, 2013) and in production (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010; Jaeger & Snider, 2013).…”